There's no gainsaying the canniness of the public service Secretaries Board.
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To commemorate its 10th birthday it set up a review of its work in such a way as to all but guarantee it came out as fragrant as roses.
Rosemary Huxtable was hired for the job. Being secretary of the Department of Finance from 2016 to 2022, she was a member of the board and was so placed in the cosy position of reviewing work in which she had been intimately involved.
The review's terms of reference required the reviewer to consult with board members, "PM&C executives" who support the board and the board's secretariat.
Other "stakeholders" could be consulted but an outline of the methodology adopted doesn't suggest the discomforting intrusion of outsiders - like interested citizens in the age of citizen-centricity.
That is to say, this is not an independent review. It is as if a recently retired CEO from Coles had been hired to review grocery prices, been told to consult with senior executives of their organisation and had some Coles staff draft up a report.
So to the surprise of no one, the review report concludes that the board "operates in a constructive and collaborative manner ... [and] is effective in its mandate." In the glow of these happy conclusions eight recommendations of notable triviality are made including, for example, that "a one hour session at the start of each board meeting be set aside for strategic discussion".
Oh to be a fly on the wall for one of those sessions.
To be blunt, this review is complacent and not significantly helpful, although it's consistent in tenor with the mutual admiration society now prevalent at the most senior levels of the public service if the speeches they make to one another are anything to go by.
More seriously, the review's incuriosity allows it to neglect the bleedingly obvious things it should have examined given its terms of reference allowed it to consider "any ... relevant matter relating to the Board's functionality and effectiveness."
Top of the pops here must be the board's structure and membership.
The board is, in effect, a standing inter-departmental committee (IDC) with 20-odd members with broad and vague executive powers. While they have done good things, IDCs have a chequered history where low achievement is not uncommon, and that's when they have very specific things to do. Getting results can be slow and, because of the desirability of general consensus, lowest common denominator results are typical.
It hasn't occurred to the reviewer to test a hypothesis that these common phenomena might plague the Secretaries Board. Certainly there are reasonable prima facie reasons for thinking this may be so for in 10 years of existence tangible results of its efforts are not thick on the ground. When PM&C was asked in 2022 about the board's main achievements it listed lots of process but not one result.
While the review notes that there are no counterpart "Secretaries Boards" in comparable overseas jurisdictions, the reviewer hasn't bothered to ask if this might signify something.
So far as membership is concerned, while carrying on about the concept of "the one APS" (whatever that might mean), the review makes no meaningful comment or recommendations to address the fact that it is unrepresentative of about 30 per cent of the public service as the heads of big agencies like Services Australia, the Tax Office and the Bureau of Statistics are not on it.
Surely the addition of four or five of the now excluded big organisations would not make the board any more cumbersome.
The review is also oblivious to the fact that the Secretaries Board is a statutory body created by the Parliament but without any reporting or accountability requirements.
As accountability is fundamental to effectiveness, it's a shame the reviewer did not consider if its absence has been adverse for the board, as it most likely has been.
As with all other statutory authorities, the Board should be required to provide an annual report to the Parliament, at a minimum.
Then far from seeing what lessons there might be in the board's less glorious moments, the reviewer passes them by.
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Thus, there is no consideration as to why and how the board helped to stymie some of the most useful and consequential recommendations of the 2019 Thodey review of the public service. Could this have been the consequence of the lowest-common denominator syndrome? Or was it bound up with an appreciation that acceptance of these recommendations would create winners and losers and that the losers were able to prevail?
Whatever, this was a depressing low point in the board's history whose lessons should have been gleaned and learned from.
And how about the robodebt case whose massive stewardship deficit the Secretaries Board with its legal "stewardship" responsibilities was powerless to prevent. The "communiques" it began to issue over the last couple of years suggest that the robodebt didn't prominently get onto its agenda until the royal commission report was imminent.
And what has the board done for "public service reform"? Could it have anything to do with its present slug-like pace? While listing this as a priority, the reviewer doesn't attempt to evaluate whether the Board has helped or hindered this cause. There's little evidence to suggest it's helped much.
Unfortunately Ms Huxtable's report on the Secretaries Board is not an exemplar of forthright, practical and useful advice. It dodges what it should have considered and it's analytically shy. It might not quite be a white-wash but it's not far off it. Anyway, you can't win 'em all, so let's assume the board is delighted even while the public service's foundations continue to wobble and parts of its house are ablaze.
- Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant. pdg@home.netspeed.com.au